Relations In Britain Research Articles

Employment Relations in Britain: 25 Years of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service

1University of Southampton Employment Relations in Britain: 25 Years of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service BrianTowersWilliamBrown OxfordBlackwell 203£9.95 0631 223 266

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe

1. Something Happened 2. Feudal Dynamics 3. The Limits of Urban Capitalism 4. State Formation 5. A Dead End and a Detour: Spain and the Netherlands 6. Elite Defensiveness and the Transformation of Class Relations in Britain and France 7. Religions and Ideology 8. Conclusion Notes Bibliography

Book Review: Employment Relations in Britain: 25 Years of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service

Book Review: Employment Relations in Britain: 25 Years of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service

Book Reviews

Towers, Brian, (ed.) Employment Relations in Britain: 25 years of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration servicesRigby, Mike, Smith, Roger and Lawlor, Teresa, (eds.) European Trade Unions: Change and ResponseTurner, Lowell, Fighting for Partnership: Labor and Politics in Unified GermanyElliot, Robert, Lucifora, Claudio and Meurs, Dominique, (eds.) Public Sector Pay Determination in the European UnionLind, Jens and Hornemann Möller, Iver, (eds.) Inclusion and Exclusion: Unemployment and Non‐standard Employment in EuropeClark, Ed and Soulsby, Anna, Organizational Change in Post‐communist Europe: Management and Transformation in the Czech RepublicDark, Taylor, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring AllianceFreeman, Richard and Rogers, Joel, What Workers WantWhetten, David and Godfrey, Paul, (eds.) Identity in Organizations: Building Theory through ConversationsTsutsui, William, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth‐Century JapanBarker, James, The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control

GENDER, COMPARATIVE RESEARCH AND BIOGRAPHICAL MATCHING

This article seeks to address some of the criticisms of 'mainstream' research methodology developed by consciously feminist theorists and researchers. It is argued that whereas 'variable oriented' methods are appropriate for the study of sex differences, the empirical examination of the processes of gender structuring requires a contextualised, case-oriented, approach. These arguments are developed drawing upon debates relating to comparative case study analysis, which are paralleled with the emerging comparative 'gender systems' approach to the study of gender relations. Drawing upon the work of Ragin, a strategy of biographical matching is developed and illustrated via examples from a European cross-national study exploring the restructuring of employment and gender relations in Britain, France and Norway.

Public relations, business news and the reproduction of corporate elite power

This article discusses the rise of corporate public relations in Britain and offers an alternative explanation of how it has benefited the corporate sector. Most assessments of corporate PR tend to support traditional radical media accounts of strong corporate influence over media production and public opinion. All either argue or assume that PR is an effective form of ‘mind control’ with which to influence ‘the masses’. Against this account, this article instead argues that corporate PR has been more frequently used to gain a competitive advantage over rivals and has been primarily targeted at other corporate elites. This corporate elite focus has worked to further exclude non-corporate elites from participation in the production of financial and business news. As a result, a more general corporate advantage has been gained as much by exclusion as persuasion of the general public. After a brief discussion of the evidence and debates, these conclusions are illustrated with a case study of the Granada take-over of Forte in 1995–96.

Feminism Facing Industrial Relations in Britain

This is an opportune time to renegotiate the boundaries between industrial relations theory and feminist analysis in Britain. Such a bargain would involve going beyond an agreement to add ‘women’s issues’ to the research agenda, to a recognition of the gendered character of employment relations and of work itself. The formal institutions involved, namely, management, trade unions and the state, cannot be treated as gender‐neutral. Further, the very way industrial relations scholars define what is ‘inside’ the industrial relations system and what is ‘outside’ reflects masculine priorities and privilege.

Constructing British Industrial Relations

One can identify the construction and transformation of three distinct systems of industrial relations in Britain over the last century. In contrast to the view that the state has been largely abstentionist in the sphere of industrial relations, or that, where intervention has taken place, it has been ad hoc, incoherent and reactive, this article makes two arguments in explaining this pattern of institutional construction. First, that the British state has been a central actor in the construction and ‘embedding’ of industrial relations institutions. Secondly, that broad processes of economic restructuring have created the context and trigger for state action. It is the timing and character of economic restructuring which explain the distinctive evolution of British industrial relations.

Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian encounters, race and identity, 1880-1930

Choice, April 2000 The study is firmly grounded in the context of contemporary analysis of race relations in Britain, and contributes to ongoing debate on postcolonialism and globalization. an important contribution to the history of Anglo-Indian metropolitan encounters...there is a lot to be gained from this studys appraisal of the current debates around the notion of identity, which throws light on the dynamic nature of identity formation of Indians in Britain in the earlier period. - Patterns and Prejudice Times Higher Education Supplement The history described in this book, besides being a useful resource for historians of the period, will be valuable in developing a deeper understanding of post-colonial Britain. International History Review Lahiri provides the best-documented study of overseas students in Britain

Management and the Taff Vale Strike of 1900

The Taff Vale Railway strike of 1900 stands as a landmark in the history of industrial relations in Britain. There is a substantial literature dealing with the strike and resulting court case. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the underlying pressures and tensions which gave rise to the strike nor to its wider consequences: the focus hitherto has been on labour, politics and labour law rather than the dynamics of the struggle between capital and labour which raged throughout the railway industry. The strike resulted from a clash between an assertive labour movement and a beleaguered management with little financial room for manoeuvre. Victory for capital paved the way for far-reaching changes in technology and working methods without conceding the gains to labour through the agency of trade union action.

Managerialism, governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance

Abstract After decades of relative stability, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. This paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. Material drawn from empirical research on local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands shows how the functioning of a distinct set of managerial ‘technologies’ — embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting — is instrumental in giving the central state the capacity to shape local institutional practice. At the same time, however, local institutional actors retain some scope to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to their own particular purposes. Whilst recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring, the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies specifies the precise mechanisms which give central state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that focusing on the reception of governmental technologies within sub-national institutional sites may offer a productive line of inquiry which can expose the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes.

Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches

Starting from a critique of protest event and political discourse analysis, we propose an extended methodological approach that has the quantitative rigor of event analysis but also retrieves the qualitative discursive elements of claims. Our political claims approach extends the sample of contentious actions beyond protest event analysis by coding institutional and civil society actors, and conventional and discursive action forms, in addition to protests by movement actors, This redefines the research object to acts of political claims making in a multi-organizational field. We use examples from a research project on mobilization about migration and ethnic relations in Britain and Germany to demonstrate the analytic gains that are possible with our approach. By situating protest and social movements, not just theoretically but also methodologically, in a wider context of political claims making, we are in a better position to follow the recent calls for more integrated approaches, which place protest within multi-organizational fields, link it to political opportunities and outcomes, and are sensitive to discursive messages.

Making American Industry Safe for Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on the State and Employee Representation in the Era of World War I.

In Making American Industry Safe for Democracy, a work of historical sociology, Jeffrey Haydu explores how basic political and economic relationships were restabilized in the aftermath of the war. Haydu compares U.S. efforts to reconstruct an open-shop regime that excluded trade unions with the reform of industrial relations in Britain and Germany. Then he compares industries within the United States and traces the extraordinarily complex manner in which prewar class relations and wartime crisis led the state to restructure employee representation. In this important study of new strategies for managing work and conflict that were emerging by the 1920s, the author also forces us to reassess the role of organization in shaping working-class mobilization and protest.

The Insider/Outsider Distinction: An Empirical Investigation

The distinction between ‘insiders' and ‘outsiders' occupies a central role in thinking about the relationship between government and interest groups in Britain. Usually, the accuracy of such distinctions are based on studies of small numbers of groups. The results of a survey of 381 groups reveals that relatively few groups could be classed as pure outsiders, while a much larger number have the features of the insider. While the methodology employed means that the results are suggestive rather than conclusive, the implications of the findings for the study of government-group relations in Britain are that the insider/outsider distinction is at best an oversimplification and at worst misleading.

The information revolution, health reform and doctor-manager relations

In the 1980s and 1990s in both Britain and America computerisation of patient data led to a raft of comparative performance indicators. The 'information revolution' began with measures of efficiency (or outputs, such as bed usage and length of hospital stay); more recently attention has begun to focus on effectiveness (or clinical outcomes, as in the case of evidence-based medicine). Simultaneously health reforms centred, in Britain, on improved management systems and the introduction of a quasi-market, and, in the United States, on managed care, cost controls and hospital mergers. This case-study of an American general hospital uses the classic Alford framework of three groups of structural interests (doctors, managers and patients) to assess the impact of these informational and organisational developments on doctor-manager relations in Britain and America. Cross-cutting local alliances based on common interests indicate that Alford's groups of structural interests should not be perceived as monolithic.

Christopher Flint. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 388. $49.50. ISBN 0-8047-3072-5.

Christopher Flint. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 388. $49.50. ISBN 0-8047-3072-5. - Volume 31 Issue 2

Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain.

A comprehensive comparative study of the distinct ideas and political arguments that have shaped French and British policies towards their ethnic minorities, and the effects of these intellectual frameworks at local, national and European levels. Charting the politics and events that brought the respective institutional solutions together, the author sets out the divergent conceptualisations of citizenship, nationality, pluralism, autonomy, public order and tolerance that make up the national 'philosophies' in the two countries - republican integration in France and multicultural race relations in Britain. This new edition, published in paperback, contains a new preface bringing the volume up-to-date in the light of new legislation and progress.

Family fictions: narrative and domestic relations in Britain, 1688-1798

Introduction 1. Toward an eighteenth-century anthropology 2. From family romance to domestic scandal: 'female arts' in The Fair Jilt 3. Robinson Crusoe and the orphaned family 4. The anxiety of affluence: Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded 5. The erotic and the domestic in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless 6. Disavowing kinship, 1760-1798 Afterword Notes Index.

The Survey Tradition in British Industrial Relations Research: an Assessment of the Contribution of Large‐Scale Workplace and Enterprise Surveys

The paper assesses the contribution to industrial relations research of the large‐scale workplace and enterprise‐based surveys of industrial relations in Britain, paying particular attention to the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS) series. It takes issue with recent criticism of survey‐based analysis in the field, arguing that industrial relations researchers have developed a distinctive and valuable survey tradition. The use of surveys in industrial relations contrasts markedly with that in labour economics, stemming from differing methodological preferences in the two fields. Some limitations of the WIRS series to date are reviewed, before considering future directions that survey research might take in order to capture the changing canvass of industrial relations in Britain.

Restructuring British Public Sector Industrial Relations: State Policies and Trade Union Responses

This article examines how Conservative governments restructured public sector in day trial relations in Britain between 1979 and 1997, and identifies the main components of trade union strategic response to change. It argues that Conservative policy is important for its impact upon trade union strategy and practice, and that public sector unions constitute the leading edge of trade union strategic modernization in Britain.